Quotes

“Music does not depend on being right, on having good education and all that.”

“Then what does it depend on?”

“On making music, Herr Haller, on making music as well and as much as possible and with all the intensity of which one is capable.”

Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf

Whoever reads history with a mind free from prejudice cannot fail to arrive at a conviction that of all military virtues, energy in the conduct of operations has always contributed the most to the glory and the success of arms.

Carl von Clausewitz, On War

The first quality of a General in Chief is to have a cool head which receives exact impressions of things, which never gets heated, which never allows itself to be dazzled, or intoxicated, by good or bad news. The successive simultaneous sensations which he receives in the course of a day must be classified, and must occupy the correct places they merit to fill, because common sense and reason are the results of the comparison of a number of sensations each equally well considered.

Napoleon

“Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,

Before we too into the Dust Descend;

Dust into Dust, and under Dust, to lie,

Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer and – sans End!”

Omar Khayyam, Rubaiyat No. XXIII

“What Marcus Aurelius means by peritrope, “turning things around,” is clarified by another passage about reservation, in which he explains that when the ruling power in us is in agreement with nature, “it converts into material for itself any obstacle that meets it, just as fire does” (4.1). That which would have been an obstacle to the original intention becomes in itself an opportunity for the exercise of virtue insofar as it amounts to accepting the divine plan and order of fate.”

“His tendency is to explain Mozart’s perfected being, just as a schoolmaster would, as a supreme and special gift rather than as the outcome of his immense powers of surrender and suffering, of his indifference to the ideals of the bourgeois, and of his patience under that last extremity of loneliness which rarefies the atmosphere of the bourgeois world to an ice-cold ether, around those who suffer to become men, that loneliness of the Garden of Gethsemane.”